German-American Discourse on Politics and Culture

January 31, 2007

Earlier I wrote about the German exile community in New York City. The heart of the intellectual exile community during the 1930s and 1940s, however, was on the west coast, in and around Hollywood. An indispensible book on the period is Salka Viertel's The Kindness of Strangers (1969). The book has been out of print for decades, but I managed to find a copy in a library in northern Maine. A German translation -- Das unbelehrbare Herz --- was published in 1982 and can be found in antiquariat book stores. The book should be reissued, this time with an index of names, since it is a valuable historical document, and Salka Viertel was a pivotal figure in German exile literature.

The book can be divided roughly into two sections. The first half deals with her childhood in Poland and her early career as a stage actress in Vienna and Berlin. The recollections of the theater life during the difficult years after World War One are fascinating. Salka worked for the director Max Reinhardt, and she has interesting anecdotes about her first encounters with the famous man. In Vienna she meets one of the two great loves of her life, Berthold Viertel ( the other was Greta Garbo). Berthold Viertel was a protégé of the Austrian writer and iconoclast Karl Kraus, and we see Kraus at the height of his power in Vienna and Berlin. Through Kraus, Salka encounters the greatest artists of time, and she provides some tantalizing glimpses of Franz Kafka ("how healthy and tan he seemed") and Rainer Maria Rilke. In 1928 Berthold Viertel is offered the opportunity to work with the German film director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau at the Fox Studios in Hollywood, and that is where the real story of The Kindness of Strangers begins.

Last spring a US Federal Court in Washington DC refused to hear the case of Khaled al-Masri, the German citizen who was kidnapped and tortured by CIA operatives in a case of mistaken identity. Since no justice is forthcoming from the US in this case -- which represented a direct violation of German sovereignty and German (and EU) law -- a court in Munich has decided to take action:

A court in Munich ordered the arrest of 13 people for the alleged abduction of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen who says he was seized by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and taken to a secret prison in Afghanistan.

Evidence collected by prosecutors yielded ``clearly identifiable'' individuals who may be undercover CIA agents, the Munich prosecutor, which obtained the warrants, said today on its Web site. The 13 could be charged with deprivation of liberty and aggravated assault for the alleged seizure of el-Masri on Dec. 31, 2003, in Macedonia.

Here, as well as in the case of Murat Kurnaz, there are questions about possible complicity or at least knowledge of the kidnapping by the former Red-Green government in Berlin. Specifically, what did Steinmeier know?

German lawmakers have pressed members of former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's government on what they knew about the el- Masri abduction. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who was Schroeder's chief-of-staff, told a committee last month that Germany provided no assistance to the U.S., while Schily said in November that former U.S. ambassador Daniel Coats confirmed the abduction and asked him to treat the information confidentially.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said after talks with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Dec. 6, 2005, in Berlin that the two had discussed el-Masri and that the ``the U.S. conceded'' that the seizure was ``a mistake.'' While U.S. officials later disputed Merkel's statement, the German government has said Merkel's statement ``can stand as it is.''

No surprise that Condoleezza Rice would lie about the case, that is part of her nature (and job description in the Bush State Department). The arrest warrants from Germany are a welcome development: they signal that the lawlessness of the Bush administration will not be tolerated in Europe.

January 27, 2007

Today is the 62nd anniversary of the liberation of the deathcamp of Auschwitz-Birkenau by the Russian army. Germany marks this day as Holocaust-Gedenktag (Holocaust Memorial Day) and Angela Merkel used the occasion to speak out against the neo-Nazi NPD. In the US, the documentary film from Germany Verdict on Auschwitz: The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial 1963-1965 can be seen in several cities. German Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries has announced that she will use Germany's position as president of the European Council for the next six months to push through a Europe-wide law that would make Holocaust denial a criminal offense. Such a law already exists in Germany and Austria:

I have never been in favor of criminalizing Holocaust denial. Tne intent of the law is to limit right-wing extremist activity, but in my view it has the opposite effect. Is there any evidence that the law has been an impediment to neo-Nazi activity activity in Germany? On the contrary, it would be appear that this is flourishing in certain parts of eastern Germany. The law only makes martyrs of odious characters such as David Irving, who was imprisoned for 18 months in Vienna for the crime of Holocaust denial. Now he is being celebrated as a hero for the cause. And where does one draw the line in a free society? Do we criminalize cartoons of the prophet Mohammed?

The place to fight against the falsification of history is in the classroom and in the media, not in the courtroom or prison.

January 26, 2007

Paying €420 million in bribes means never having to say you're sorry - at least if you are the CEO of Siemens. You have to ask: what does it take to get fired from the executive suite from a German corporation these days? The German culture of executive entitlement was on display yesterday in Munich a the Siemens annual shareholders meeting. Yes, the natives were restless: 10,000 shareholders showed up and threatened to vote against the Executive Board, but in the end, the executives went home considerably richer and with their jobs secure:

The scale of shareholder distrust in the management was laid bare when the meeting gave only 72% support to executive board members and about 65% to supervisory board directors - including some of Germany's business luminaries - far short of the 90% Siemens executives had hoped for.

But moves to refuse to approve the two boards' actions in the past year evaporated after Heinrich von Pierer, chairman, said he had withdrawn from the audit committee investigating the bribery scandal to avoid any conflict of interest over events that took place when he was chief executive. Visibly contrite, he expressed "deep distress" that efforts he had instigated to ensure full compliance with corporate governance codes had failed.

The Siemens scandal reveals the weaknesses in the German corporate governance structure. Once the exsitence of the slush fund was discovered, Siemens did not bring in an outside party to investigate. Rather, the former CEO and current chairman of the supervisory board - Heinrich von Pierer - led the inquiry, even though the secret accounts date back to the period when he was running the company. But the €420 million in bribes is only the "tip of the iceberg". There is also the collapse of BenQ - the spin-off successor to Siemens' cell phone division, putting thousands of former Siemens employees out of work. Yesterday the European Commission hit Siemens with a €396 million fine for price fixing. On top of all of this, Siemens' executives rewarded themselves for their gross mismanagment with a 30% salary increase.

It is popular to bash the Sarbanes-Oxley rules in the US as cumbersome and unfair, but they would have prevented a scandal of this magnitude here. Is there any doubt that if Siemens were a US corporation CEO Klaus Kleinfeld would have been charged with a crime and would face jail-time? American insitutional investors hold 15% of Siemens capital, maybe it;s time for them to demand accountability in the executive suite?

January 25, 2007

The theme of this year's World Economic Forum taking place now in Davos is "The Shifting Power Equation" and the shift was apparent with the opening keynote address. As David Rothkopf writes in the Huffington Post blog, Bush and Blair are out, Angela Merkel is in:

The star of the first day of Davos was a homely middle-aged woman from a declining region of the world. Not very stylishly dressed in a burgundy blazer, looking vaguely professorial, thoughtfully and without pretext staring off into the half-distance as she framed her thoughts, she nevertheless held 1,000 people in the Congress Center's main hall rapt as she spoke about globalization, her own experiences, the relationship between the developed and the developing world, and her sense of Europe's role.

Addressed by session chairman Klaus Schwab as "Frau Bundeskanzler", Angela Merkel is an unlikely focus for such a glamorous event--or rather she would be if not for the fact that she leads Europe's most important country, and that she is doing such a good job of it.

Incidentally, I thought it was a bit ironic that in her speech Angela Merkel celebrates globalization, acknowledging that this indeed resulting in a power shift to more dynamic economies such as China and India, but she rejects expanding the G-8 Group to include those countries.

Climate protection and energy conservation were key topics in Angela Merkel's speech, and she told the audience that she was " hearing signals from the U.S. that are more hopeful than those of past years'' referring to comments made by President Bush in his State of the Union Address.

Bushes remarks on climate were the only positive aspects of his address, judging from the overall reaction to the SOTU in the German Press. Stern reported that Bush seemed to be in an "isolation chamber" as he spoke before Congress. His new SURGE strategy in Iraq didn't get much support either. In Berlin, Merkel's office said there were "no surprises" in this new plan, and Karsten Voigt (SPD) who coordinates US-Germany relations in Berlin told N-TV that Bush's strategy "offered little chance for success." One gets the sense that in Europe Bush has become pretty irrelevant on the world stage, as Angela Merkel's star continues to rise.